Category: Latest Research

Fathers want to step up at home when it comes to caring for their children.

But stepping up involves speaking up—to their babies—which they may be less likely to do, according to a study published in the December 2014 issues of Pediatrics.

This study, led by director of the Providence, Rhode Island Women & Infants Neonatal Follow-Up Clinic, Betty R. Vohr, MD, FAAP, equipped babies with microphones and asked the parents to turn them on when both were around.

In looking at the data over time, they found that babies heard more words from mothers than fathers, and that fathers were less likely to speak in what researcher Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington calls parentese than mothers. When parents speak parentese, they slow down their speech, their voices are musical, and their facial expressions are dramatic. Babies much prefer parentese, and they learn more when parents speak this way.

Why does this matter? Because fathers may be losing an opportunity to help their babies learn language, which is the single best predictor of how children do in school, according to many, many studies.

Myths about generational difference abound, but there is one change that’s anything but a myth. It is that younger fathers— especially Millennials and Gen Xers—are much more committed to being involved in their children’s lives and are spending more time being with and caring for their children than fathers in other generations.

Fathers don’t want to be stick figures in their children’s lives!

Unfortunately, so much of the research on children’s learning has been focused on mothers, but that needs to change.

This new study in Pediatrics is unique in that it includes fathers as well as mothers. Yet it like many other studies counted the words that children hear and that is only part of the story.

A study that is being featured today as a keynote at the Annual Conference of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) in Dallas shows that counting words is not enough. The researchers (Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University, Roberta Golinkoff of the University of Delaware and Lauren Anderson of Georgia State University) found that the way that mothers (yes, only mothers were studied) talk with children matters more. Three things stand out in predicting children’s later positive language development:

• the adult cares—they are engaged in looking at and talking about something that both are interested in;
• they have done this before—the child knows what to expect because they have had conversations (with and without words) like this before; and
• the conversations are fluid and connected—they go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

It is so important to tell the whole story when reporting research to families and professionals.

From the study in Pediatrics this week, all of us can learn how important men are to the development of children’s language. From the study being featured at NAEYC, all of us can learn that it is HOW we talk to young children that makes all the difference.

Ellen Galinsky has been committed to telling the whole story of child and brain development research through Mind in the Making. She is the Bezos Family Foundation Chief Science Officer and Founder/Executive Director of Mind in the Making. As president and co-founder of Families and Work Institute (FWI), she helped establish the field of work and family life during the time she was at Bank Street College of Education, where she was on the faculty for 25 years. Her more than 100 books and reports include the best-selling Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs, Ask The Children, and the now classic The Six Stages of Parenthood. She has published over 300 articles in journals, books and magazines. She co-directs the National Study of the Changing Workforce, the most comprehensive nationally representative study of the U.S. workforce–updated every five to six years.

Jacklyn “Jackie” Bezos is committed to telling the whole story of child and brain development research through Vroom. She is president and co-founder of the Bezos Family Foundation, which supports rigorous, inspired learning environments for young people to put their education into action. Through investments in research, public awareness and programs, the foundation aims to elevate the field of education and improve life outcomes for children. At the core of the foundation’s work is a belief that all young people deserve the chance to achieve their full potential and make a meaningful contribution to society. Through the foundation, Bezos has pioneered collaborative initiatives that give young people a platform to co-create solutions, including the Bezos Scholars Program at the Aspen Institute, the Aspen Challenge and Students Rebuild.

Reprinted from The Huffington Post

Have you ever noticed that your toddler spends more time playing with the gift-wrapping than the present that was wrapped inside? Or that your older children lose interest in a new toy if that toy has just one way to play with it, and instead gravitate back to materials, like blocks, crayons, miniature animals or iPads where the possibilities are endless?

I have been writing on the researchers and neuroscientists who have genuinely inspired me in my journey to create Mind in the Making, I am sharing the story of Laura Schulz of MIT. Her studies help explain what curiosity is and thus how to promote children’s curiosity in the gifts we give them.

I am not sure about other parents, but I didn’t think too much about curiosity except to assume that my children were naturally curious. They wondered about everything that was new and were bursting with endless questions: “What’s that?” And, “Why, why, why.” Interestingly, however, the research on children’s curiosity reveals that is it far more complex than this.

Laura Schulz has been being curious about curiosity throughout her career and finds not surprisingly, that children—in fact all of us—are curious about what’s new. But there are other drivers of curiosity. Schulz explains:

We often seem to be curious about things that aren’t particularly novel—they just puzzle us.

Her quest to understand curiosity has led to new insights:

I think there are two different things that can provoke curiosity. The simplest one is a violation of your prior beliefs. You go into an experience with a certain expectation that “this is the way the world is,” and then you see some evidence that’s inconsistent with that.

When this happens, Schulz says:

You have to do something with that evidence. You can deny it. You can try to explain it away. You could realize that your beliefs are wrong and that they have to change. But one way or another, you need more information to figure out what to do.

Children also become curious when they have two competing expectations or theories. Schulz elaborates:

The other time you might be curious is if you see evidence that fails to distinguish among competing beliefs. There are many things that might be true, and the evidence just doesn’t determine which one is the case.

In scientific terms, when people are trying to understand how things work, they are typically trying to understand causal relationships—what causes something to happen. A toddler might be trying to understand what happens if she pushes her rubber duck underwater in the bathtub. Does it always rise back up to the surface? Yes, it does. That kind of evidence, in scientific terms, is “unconfounded”—there’s a clear and consistent cause and effect. When Schulz talks about “competing beliefs” where “many things might be true,” she’s talking about “confounded evidence”—it’s not clear exactly what the causes are.

Schulz and one of her graduate students, Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz, created a study to further explore the question of when children remain curious. They designed a red jack-in-the-box toy that has two levers, one on each side. When both levers are pushed at the exact same time, two toys—a straw puppet and a duck—pop up. This toy demonstrates a “confounded” experience: there’s no way to determine how the toy works simply by looking at it. Maybe it takes both levers to make the toy work or maybe it doesn’t.

In the experiment, an experimenter shows preschool-aged children this toy. The experimenter says to each child, “You push down your lever and I’ll push down my lever at the same time.” They count to three and each pushes one of the levers. Both the puppet and the duck pop up. Although they repeat this action several times, the child can’t figure out from this process which lever controls which pop-up toy.

A second group of children is introduced to the toy in a different way. After the experimenter and the child push down the levers at the same time, they each take turns. The child can easily see which lever controls the duck and which lever controls the puppet. Then, as Schulz explains:

We take that jack-in-the-box away. We bring it right back out along with a brand-new box that the children have never played with before.

Normally, children would be drawn to the new yellow toy because children are curious about what’s new. But that didn’t happen for one of the groups of children in the experiment.

The researchers found that the children who knew how the old red jack-in-the-box worked (that is, they had unambiguous or unconfounded information) went to play with the new box. But the children who didn’t know how it worked (they had ambiguous or confounded information) kept playing with it, as you will see in this video of the experiment.

There are some very important lessons for me in this study by Laura Schulz. The first is to give children gifts that puzzle them, that intrigue them, that make them want to find out more. Rather than toys with just one way to use them, give them toys that can be used in many ways–that’s why the classic toys (like materials to use in building and creating or exploring) remain classic.

But the second lesson is far more important. It’s how we respond to children when they ask us their endless questions—”What’s that?” or “Why, why, why.”

Often we are so busy that we want to slough off their questions or tell what we think so we can finish everything on our to-do lists. But if we want our children to remain curious, we will find times when we can stop, notice what they are curious about and then ask them questions to keep them curious and wanting to explore. For example, we might say:

Why do you think that rubber duck always pops up when you push it underwater in the bathtub? Do you think if you put a washcloth on top of it, it would stay underwater? Do you think your empty shampoo bottle would float? Do you think it would float if we filled it with water?

Or with older children, we might say:

Why do you think your friend seemed unhappy at the party? Was it something that might have happened to her? Was it something that happened between you? What might make things better for him?

It is by remaining curious that children learn, whether about the natural world or about people. And that is a gift that lasts!

Reprinted from The Huffington Post

This is part of a series to share the findings of child development researchers and neuroscientists who have genuinely inspired me in my journey to create Mind in the Making. Their research is truly “research to live by.”

I’m writing about Heidelise Als of Harvard University, because her studies are so instructive in how we can help children deal with challenges and learn to become stronger as a result. Perhaps surprisingly, learning this skill doesn’t just happen when children are older. Als’ research is with pre-term babies born 10 to 12 weeks before their due date—the most fragile babies in neonatal intensive care units. When adults watch what young children do to cope successfully and then create situations where they can do more of the same, the process for learning to take on challenges is seeded.

The insight that led to Als’ research began in her native Germany when she was as a teacher of 3rd grade boys. One of the boys, Reinhart, always came to school early, sat in his seat close to the front of the classroom, lined up all of his pencils and books on the desk and was ready for the day to begin. Since Reinhart was doing very well and got good grades, Als decided to move him farther back in the room so another child who needed extra help could have a seat in the front. She says:

Reinhart moved promptly, yet the next day he didn’t come in. He had never missed a day of school. I was very concerned. He didn’t come the next day.

After a few days, Als stopped by the bakery Reinhart’s family ran. His mother told her that the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong, but her son had been vomiting. The clue came when Reinhart’s mother mentioned, “He did tell me you moved his seat, and he’s now sitting farther back.” Als says:

I learned from that that despite seeing the image of a very competent child, I should have known from his need to have everything lined up at the start of the school day—that he didn’t have the flexibility that other children had.

Reinhart was given his old seat back when he returned to school, but Als gained even more from that experience. She learned how important it is to “read” the language of children’s behavior, to figure out how they cope best and then build on their own positive coping strategies. This lesson was reinforced after she moved to the U.S. to attend graduate school and had her own child, who is significantly brain damaged. She had to learn to understand the language of his behavior in order to help him.

Als brought that sensitivity into her research on premature babies. Through advances in technology in the 1970s, these babies, who couldn’t yet breathe on their own, could be kept alive with medical ventilators that, in effect, breathed for them. What really interested Als was “to see what these babies were up against” and how they were handling these stressful situations.

As she observed them, it became clear to her that good medical care was coming at the price of good developmental care:

The premature babies would be pinned down, held down, strapped down, and even chemically treated, if needed, so that they would not breathe against the ventilator in order to let the ventilator do the work that it needed to do.

A similar kind of scene took place when a nurse or doctor wanted to check on a baby, listen to the baby’s heart rate or change him or her:

The baby would just splay out—all four limbs would fly out, and then the baby would try to grasp at something, but the nurse by then would already be putting her stethoscope on the chest, listening to the chest sounds. And then she would turn the baby over again and listen to the back, and then she would start to suction his lungs and then she would give a nebulizer treatment.

As the check-up progressed, Als reports, babies would become more and more distraught; finally, they would “go limp and typically stop breathing.” It was clear to Heidelise Als that the medical care was so focused on caring for these premature babies’ hearts or lungs that they were neglecting the care of the whole child:

It seemed we were wasting a lot of the baby’s energies that were very precious. We were going against the baby. We were pushing the baby to become exhausted and give in.

When a baby who was initially feisty gave in, the medical charts would record that the baby had become well adjusted. But Als saw a different reality:

The baby had given up. The baby just let the world happen.

Als and her colleagues—nurses and doctors—set out to improve developmental care and to document that it can make a difference. They thought of this as listening to their behavioral “language.” She says:

If we can understand the ‘words’ the baby is saying, maybe we can fill in the meaning of the sentence and understand the message.

These observations led to solutions. For example, if the baby’s hands splay out, give the baby something to hold onto. If the baby is squirming under the bright lights, make the lighting softer. If the baby is getting agitated, hold the baby until his or her breathing becomes more stable. After documenting and recording behavior, they launched into a study where the nurses “read” and then responded to the baby’s behavior in ways that built on that baby’s coping strategies, and thus gave the baby more control.

The results of this experiment were impressive. There was reduced severity of chronic lung disease in these premature babies, improved brain functioning, improved growth and earlier release from the hospital. In addition, their care was significantly less costly.

Here’s the lesson I take from this. Children, even those as young as premature infants, are less prone to the harmful effects of stress when they are supported in managing their own stress by being helped to use the strategies they have for coping and for calming down.

And when children are older, they can become an even more active part of figuring out themselves how to deal with tough times.

Als tells the story of a child for whom any reminders of 9/11 (like fire trucks) would trigger emotionally flooding. With the help of adults, he created his own strategy to calm down. He would put his head down on the table to “think” and would wait until he had “thought enough”—and then he was ready to go on.

From these studies, it is clear that we can help children learn to handle tough times if we enable them to become increasingly active partners in creating their own solutions. It has worked for me and it has worked for my children. What about you?

This story is taken from Mind in the Making.

This article continues my series to share the research of child development researchers and neuroscientists who have genuinely inspired me to create Mind in the Making. Their work is truly “research to live by!”

I am sharing the story of Anne Fernald of Stanford University because her studies provide important insights into helping children learn to communicate. This is an increasingly salient issue in our times where there is widespread concern that communicating has been reduced to spitting out sound bites rather than illuminating the complexities of situations, texting rather than connecting, and reducing thoughts to 140 characters.

Anne Fernald has been a pioneering researcher in studying the origins of human communication, but she didn’t start out to do this kind of work. Her original interests were in literature. All of that changed when she went to live in Germany, far from home, surrounded by a language, German, that she initially didn’t understand. The stark contrast in the culture and the language caused her to look back not only on her own culture and language in new ways, but also to begin to probe the very nature of communication. This was accelerated by the birth of her two children. Fernald says, “Our children were born there. Becoming a parent in another language is a wonderful experience because it gave me distance.”

Fernald pulled back and observed what happens in everyday moments. She says:

What drew me to the study of language was a moment of epiphany. One of my dear friends had a baby a few months before our second daughter was about to be born, and I was asked to be the godmother of this child. I went to the hospital on the second day and my friend put her newborn child into my hands to introduce us.

To her own surprise, Fernald introduced herself to her godchild in singsong German, “I immediately thought: now where did that come from? Was this a performance for her German-speaking mother? Or was I just intuitively trying to engage with this newborn baby?”

Not only was Fernald acutely aware of her words, but she was also struck by the fact that she was singing them. When her own baby was born a few weeks later, she found herself singing the same kind of melody to her newborn—this time in English.

Fernald’s experiences in a new country led her into what has become a lifelong study of communication, beginning as a volunteer in a scientific center studying infant development in Germany and continuing to graduate school and then to Stanford University, where she is now a professor.

In her own first study, Fernald recorded German mothers talking to their newborns, analyzing the tones of their voices as one would analyze music. She found that the range of their voices stretched across two octaves. She wondered if infants actually prefer this way of talking (called infant-directed speech) to adult-directed speech and she developed one of the first auditory preference methods to address this question. The technique entailed her recording mothers’ adult-directed and infant-directed speech:

I had the moms speak to me and speak to their four-month-old. So the mom might say to me, ‘Well, I don’t take my children out so much, because it’s been raining a lot,’ but to her baby, she says, ‘Hey, sugar bear! Hey, sugar bear!’ I selected little sections of that speech and put them on tape.

Then she “trained” other four-month-olds so that if they turned their heads one way, they heard infant-directed speech, but if they turned them the other way, they heard adult-directed speech. She alternated the sides, so the findings wouldn’t reflect a preexisting preference for the right or left sides, “We found babies would turn more in the direction that would turn on the infant-directed speech.”

The first lesson from Fernald’s research is that we have to be attuned to our children in order to communicate with them. When we are attuned, we adjust what we say to them and how we say it, not just send out random missives of words.

And it’s not just words that we are communicating. Long before babies can understand words that connote feelings, they begin to differentiate among a range of emotions.

Fernald observed that parents also use their tone of voice to manage their infants’ behavior, typically to praise or to prohibit. Curious to know if the parent’s tone by itself was sufficient to regulate the child, she tape-recorded parents saying things that conveyed approval or prohibition in several different languages—French, German, Italian, Japanese, British English, and American English.

She and her colleagues then tested five-month-old American babies with these “messages” in unfamiliar languages:

These little American babies would hear the praise and they would smile and relax; they would hear the prohibition and they would stiffen a little and their eyes would widen. 

These sounds—in a different language, from a total stranger—had predictable effects on babies’ behavior.

The second lesson is that our feelings about our children—of approval or disapproval, for example—are transmitted to them even before they can understand words.

In her most recent research, Fernald has examined how efficiently children process new words. She has created experiments to investigate this: The baby is sitting on mom’s lap in a little booth and there are two pictures on two monitors that the child is looking at, to the left and to the right.

Let’s say that on the left monitor is a picture of a dog and on the right monitor is a picture of a baby, though the positions of these pictures are changed throughout the experiment. When the child hears, “Where’s the baby?” the researchers look at how the child processes this information and when the child begins to shift attention to look at the picture that has just been named. Does the child begin to shift his or her focus upon hearing the first syllable “bay,” or does the child wait until the whole word, “baby,” is said?”

Fernald calls this efficiency of processing or fluency of processing and it develops rapidly from about 12 to 24 months and beyond. She explains that if a child doesn’t need to wait until the end of a word to “grab it,” he or she is ready for the word that comes along next, “When you’re a very young language learner, what comes next is likely to be new, so the more efficiently you can process familiar words, the better able you are to attend to the new information that comes along and potentially make use of it.”

They have found this to be the case. Children who processed language more quickly when they were younger had greater vocabulary growth in their second year.

Children differ in their efficiency in processing language. How parents talk with children matters. In a longitudinal study, Fernald and her colleagues found that the children of mothers who spoke more, used different words for the same object, used different types of words, and spoke in longer phrases to their children at 18 months, not only had larger vocabularies, but were also faster at processing words at twenty-four months. As Fernald puts it, these “little differences can add up to a big effect.”

“For the young child, there are always new things to be learned in almost every sentence they hear. So that advantage, small as it is, can add up to a big advantage later on, because the capacity for learning is then increased,” Fernald says.

The final lesson is that communicating is not talking at children, it is talking with children in a give and take way—the child says something, we elaborate and extend what they say.

In doing so, we are not only providing children with tools for communicating, we are also engaging them in using language to express themselves and to learn about their world. For those who are concerned about communication skills in our society, it is important to remember that having rich and responsive conversations with young children is the foundation for healthy communications in the future.

This story is taken from Mind in the Making.

Praising Children

Question: I have read that praising my child is important for her self-esteem, but then I have also read that too much praise can spoil my child. I’m confused. How should I praise my child?

Kids are amazing and it’s easy to find ways to authentically praise your child while, at the same time, promote the life skill of Taking on Challenges.

Taking on Challenges: Life is full of stresses and challenges. Children who are willing to take on challenges (instead of avoiding them or simply coping with them) do better in school and in life.

We typically think that children who are praised a lot will feel better about themselves, but this is not necessarily true. It’s how we praise children that matters. Carol Dweck of Stanford University found that adults who praise children for their personality (“you are smart” or “you are so talented”) develop what she calls a fixed mindset. They begin to believe that these characteristics are inborn and can’t be changed.

As a result, they want to hold onto these labels and then become less willing to try things that are hard, where they might not seem as smart. On the other hand, children who are praised for their effort (“you tried so hard”) or their strategies (“you figured out how to put on your sock by yourself”), develop a growth mindset, where they see their abilities and intelligence as something that can be changed.

Children who hold a growth mindset are more likely to try really hard in the face of challenges.

Praise effort and strategies, not intelligence or personality. Rather than praising your child’s personality or intelligence (“You’re so ‘artistic’ or ‘athletic’”), criticizing him or her (“You’re lazy”), or attributing their accomplishments to luck, instead praise your child’s efforts or strategies. When your child sees that she or he can try and learn something new, your child will learn to feel good about herself.

Help your daughter set her own challenging goals and to work toward them. Taking on Challenges includes believing that we can do things even when they are hard. Encouraging her when she’s working hard toward meaningful goals is important. It’s best not to praise your child all of the time for everything because the praise becomes less special and thus has less impact. Children will learn to work diligently on a goal when they are intrinsically motivated rather than doing something for approval.

1. Be a role model and promote curiosity.

Set goals and work toward them and share your experiences, strategies and feelings about the process with your child. It’s important to share why you are working toward the goals (personal satisfaction, new knowledge, etc.) so your child can see that praise is not the reward, but rather, the experience and process.

The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests the importance of setting appropriate expectations for success.

2. Set appropriate expectations.

Setting expectations for goals that are not too low or too high is critical to developing competence and confidence. If you are overprotecting your child, and she is too dependent on you, or if expectations are so high she’ll never can succeed, she may feel powerless and incapable of controlling the circumstances in her life.

3. Help your child find ways to contribute.

Self-esteem is a key feature of leading a fulfilling life. Children develop a positive 
sense of self if they think they’re making a contribution. Help your child find things to 
do that makes her feel good, like taking care of the dog or making a card for someone who feels sick.

©2023 Mind in the Making